ABOUT 

TRANSIENCE is the thesis exhibition of the 2025 graduating Fine Arts class of Mississippi State University. The exhibition contains bodies of artwork created by 7 seniors, showed and installed at two different venues – each body of work unique in content, medium and scale. 

The public reception will be on May 11, 2025 from 2 to 4 p.m. During the reception, seniors will be presenting and extrapolating on their work, both inside and outside the event. 

Fine Arts Seniors: 

Rylee Brabham 

Rylee Brabham is a multimedia installation artist born and raised in Mississippi. Their sculptural practice frequently utilizes the aesthetic of domestic spaces to explore the nature of belonging and belongings, often running in tandem with the ironies of religious ideology and normative gender ideals that echo in their upbringing. Objects both found and fabricated appear in Brabham’s works: cast metal, welded grids, and hand-shaped furniture meet quilt pieces, embroidery samplers, and sewn garments to create installations that complicate relationships between gender and labor. Interrogating the ubiquity of southern detritus, Brabham’s works culminate as richly layered interior and exterior scenes, deploying narratives of queerness that question the nature of home.

Bella Brownlee 

Bella Brownlee is a mixed-media sculpture artist from Mississippi. She creates sculptural installations referencing wetland ecosystems, highlighting the connections between humans, plants, and animals. By meticulously recreating organisms and environments with man-made materials and waste, human presence and artificiality is emphasized. Her work encourages an appreciation and contentment with the world and community given to us throughout our shared existence; while also asking the viewer to contemplate the pattern of behavior they leave in their wake. With metal, clay, wood, and waste materials, she explores the organic, the colorful, and the fantastical forms seen and experienced in nature.

Annabelle Carraway 

A Starkville native, Annabelle Carraway is a multidisciplinary artist pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Mississippi State University with an emphasis in printmaking. Her work was exhibited in the 51st and 52nd MSU Student Juried Exhibitions and published as the cover of MSU Foundation’s 2022 Spring Magazine.Through her art, Annabelle explores themes of movement, narrative, and emotion, often depicting animals and figures in dynamic compositions. She aims to highlight the beauty within subjects that society often overlooks or deems unappealing, inviting viewers to see the value in all living beings. Her recent work delves into the perception of animals labeled as pests to challenge preconceived notions by evoking empathy and curiosity in her audience.

Elizabeth Nowell 

Through her use of found objects, fabrics, multimedia paintings, and collages, Decatur-born painter Elizabeth Nowell tells a love story from a time long past, one of a chivalrous cowboy and a dainty belle, but also of staggering beauty and past lives. By doing this, Elizabeth hopes to engender a divine feeling of self-love and explore theological aspects of the self.

Samantha Martell 

Born and raised in Melbourne, Florida, Samantha Martell’s aim with her mezzotint engravings is to capture the complexity and elegance of the human form, but not without imbuing it with a sense of drama and mystique. The veiled nature of her figures leaves much to the viewer’s imagination, inviting both intrigue and trepidation in equal measure. Samantha draws inspiration from Hellenistic Greek sculptures, the Renaissance, and Baroque periods.

Abi Parish 

Abi Parish is a 24-year-old interdisciplinary sculpture artist from North Mississippi. Her work examines the dangers and effects of climate change in the Anthropocene while also exploring the possibilities of what our planet and intelligence on Earth will be like post-humanity. She draws inspiration from her rural home, growing up around an industrial, run-down gravel equipment company that her grandfather owns. Witnessing various vines and plant life steadily growing over these industrial areas has impacted her positive perspective on nature’s ability to overcome everything that has been thrown at it

David Roman 

Vulgar, standoffish, and offensive, the work of Mexican-American artist David Roman is often chaotic, but not without purpose. By employing a graphic style of ink and acrylic in black and white, their work aims to satirize and lampoon the world we live in today while also engaging in dialogue with the persistent human penchant for dividing things into quartets.